Phycocyanin Extraction and Production of Crude Bio-Oil from Residual Biomass

Large-scale cultivation of algae is getting increasingly popular to produce environmentally sustainable crude bio-oil and other products. These phototrophs can be cultivated on non-agriculture lands with minimal nutrient requirements. If one gets multiple products from single production unit (biorefinery approach), the overall value increases leading to techno-economically favorable production. Hydrothermal Liquefaction (HTL) converts biomass into biofuels without drying the feedstock, uses water as the reaction medium at high temperature and high pressure. Nitrogen is one of the major rate-limiting factors in hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) process. Crude bio-oil (CBO) from HTL is not suited for direct fuel applications due to undesired hetero-atoms like nitrogen and oxygen. It needs to be upgraded further, which adds on to the cost of overall processing of biofuel. Here we demonstrated that the reduction of nitrogen by removing pigment protein (phycocyanin) could significantly increase overall HTL efficiency. The CBO and extracted phycocyanin have been fully characterized and reported here.